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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29314626">Return My Heart</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/TBs_LMC/pseuds/TheMoments'>TheMoments (TBs_LMC)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dragon Age: Inquisition</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Confident Cullen Rutherford, First Kiss, First Time, Flashbacks, Herald's Rest, Hero Worship, Kirkwall (Dragon Age), Laughter, Lost Love, M/M, Minor Male Inquisitor/Dorian Pavus, POV Cullen Rutherford, POV First Person, Past Relationship(s), Reunions, Skyhold (Dragon Age), The Iron Bull (Dragon Age) is a Good Friend, being dumped</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 02:07:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,749</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29314626</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/TBs_LMC/pseuds/TheMoments</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Cullen gets dumped. Iron Bull thinks this is a good thing. In the dark of night, someone else proves him right.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Cullen Rutherford/Trevelyan, Hawke/Cullen Rutherford, Male Hawke/Cullen Rutherford, Male Inquisitor/Cullen Rutherford</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Return My Heart</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I started out romancing Cullen on this (mumbles into shirtsleeve)-thousandth play-through. I inevitably gave in to Dorian in spite of my best intentions to stick with Cullen this time (yes I've tried this before) because apparently I am incapable of playing DAI without romancing Dorian. He’s so…Dorian! Agh. ::holds head::</p>
<p>Anyway, so I hemmed and hawed and finally had to break up with Cullen, and that made me feel like shite, so this story is Cullen sticking his tongue out at me. Rightfully so, I might add.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>RETURN MY HEART</strong>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>I should have known it was too much to ask. I even told him I hadn’t thought it possible. I had wanted to kiss him – and do much more with him – since that look he got on his face back in Haven. The one that told me he knew he had to die to save us all. It took my breath away. A hero being born, made, forged before my very eyes. I wanted him more than I had wanted anyone in a good long while. That he was – <em>is</em> – the Inquisitor held me back once we’d settled at Skyhold. That I thought we had lost him at Haven, and his confession about concern over me making it out safely as well, emboldened me.</p>
<p>Foolishly, as it turns out.</p>
<p>I kissed him only twice. We had dinner together twice, both occurrences on the second floor of the Herald’s Rest. We are both so busy that we rarely had time to so much as schedule a chess game, though he ensured we did meet to play twice a week.</p>
<p>In truth, I managed to hold on to that romantic attachment for all of three weeks before he inevitably ended it.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry,” he said as I stared at him in disbelief. “I can’t do this anymore.”</p>
<p>I wasn’t certain what had happened. What had changed. I beat myself up thinking it was my workaholic nature. Perhaps I’d not paid him enough attention. Perhaps our earlier discussion about him being of the nobility and me not, haunted him until he realized that even if he could get his devout family to accept a future husband instead of a future wife, I wouldn’t be worthy of their standards.</p>
<p>My breeding, I thought. My negligence. My issues withdrawing from lyrium. The fault all on me.</p>
<p>I’m mature enough to know that we weren’t in deeply enough for it to be considered anything more the earliest stages of courtship under normal circumstances. But everything is heightened in these times we’re facing now. Emotions run hotter, longer and harder than ever before and I honestly thought he felt as I did. Though now, as I examine myself in that uncomfortable way I’m never keen to, I think perhaps it was more infatuation, or perhaps idolization, in truth.</p>
<p>Or maybe replacement, if I’m to digress to honesty.</p>
<p>As I think back on it, I realize my fatal flaw where building anything with Trevelyan was concerned: I was so consumed by my own shortcomings and disbelief and working such long hours to prove I could be their commander in spite of my past and my lyrium withdrawal that I barely slept given the nightmares I endure. Because of that exhaustion and lack of focus on anything but the work, I never actually asked him how long he’d wanted to kiss <em>me</em>, which might’ve been the thing to do when he asked it of me. I never inquired as to whether he had feelings. Even now as I think on doing so I feel my face flush with heat.</p>
<p>I never was good with my words, unless it was to discuss soldiering.</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <em>“No offense, Commander,” Iron Bull said two nights ago when he found me drowning my sorrows at the Rest, “but if you want someone to have eyes only for you, you have to actually let them see you and make sure you’re front and center in their consciousness at all times.”</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>At that very moment, Dorian entered the tavern and with but a single gesture of his hand and a sharp, witty one-liner, had the entire first floor either eating out of his hand or cursing his existence.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Exhibit A,” Bull pointed out.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>Basically, making sure everyone knew who he was and that he was there, and heaven help you if you didn’t acknowledge it. He most certainly didn’t have his head up his ass, I begrudgingly acquiesced to my Qunari drinking partner.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Might all work out for the best anyway,” Bull shrugged. </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“How does getting dumped by the Herald of Andraste work out for the best?”</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Hey, you never know what’s out there waiting for you to pull your head outta your ass.”</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>At that moment, the very man we were speaking of walked into the tavern, stopped, searched the room and broke out into a huge grin as he spotted…someone. Someone who was at that very moment reminiscing about Minrathous with Krem.</em>
</p>
<p><em>The Inquisitor moved up next to them, and both men’s eyes lit up as the conversation grew more animated. Dorian’s smile, unlike the knowing smirks or superior half-smiles he usually tosses around, was </em>genuine<em>. I will never forget watching them from above, unseen, for the hour they were there eating supper. I learned a lot, including the fact that I really had no idea how to have a relationship of any kind, friendship or otherwise.</em></p>
<hr/>
<p>I close my eyes now as I lean against the battlement wall and know that I could never have been what Trevelyan needed by his side even if we’d loved each other to sheer madness. That much was obvious earlier today when I spotted him and Dorian walking the grounds and watching the soldiers train whilst Dorian regaled him with every single crime of fashion being committed by the Inquisition’s armor. They laughed uproariously a few times. They had such camaraderie. Such a…togetherness, and after Dorian had only been here for five weeks.</p>
<p>I had had that once, though it’d had to be kept hidden from view.</p>
<p>I admit I felt a pang of jealousy watching them. But I also am not that man. I’m a quiet Ferelden. I like the peace of Ferelden – well, when there’s no Blight and no rifts, of course. I detested Kirkwall, which seemed as if it was a city built by a city that wanted to boast it was a city. I wasn’t fond of Kinloch because even when I was off-duty there wasn’t really anywhere to go but the tavern and that just wasn’t me.</p>
<p>Maybe Varric was right when he called me a prude.</p>
<p>Be that as it may, I walk the battlements tonight with the barest sliver of a moon providing no light to speak of. Torches convey their flickering flames upon the courtyard but here it is blessedly dark and anonymous. And that’s why, as I take the few steps down to a small depressed landing and seat myself upon a barrel shoved off to the side, I’m surprised to note another shadow lurking in the same space.</p>
<p>“Oh, excuse me,” I mutter, “I didn’t mean to intrude.”</p>
<p>“You’re not intruding,” comes an all-too-familiar male voice, one that I’d not thought to hear again. “After all, it’s the Inquisition’s castle.”</p>
<p>I freeze in place. In disbelief. “Hawke?” I whisper, my voice already gone, my legs feeling oddly weak. “It can’t be.”</p>
<p>“It is,” he confirms, stepping forward just enough that I can see his black, unruly hair, the warpaint splotch across his nose, his beard…and it takes my breath away, reminding me of everything I’d tried so hard to leave behind in Kirkwall.</p>
<p>Him included.</p>
<p>I remember his touch as if it was yesterday.</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <em>He caught up with me as I stalked back toward the city, the sand irritating me, the salty sea air irritating me. Being bested and having to be saved by no better than a mercenary irritating me. I was there to prove myself after the horrors I’d endured at Kinloch Hold and while my instincts about Wilmod were on-target, I had been embarrassed just now, out-performed and having to be saved by people who not only weren’t Templars, but who I knew counted mages among their number.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>The worst of all being that I knew damn well Hawke himself was one, although he had spent that entire battle just now using no magic at all that I could detect. He was very clever. Very skilled at hiding what he really was. A damn fine dual-wielder – a skill he must have honed to perfection to ensure nobody suspected he could also burn down a city if he’d a mind.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>What made me angry, however, was that as duty-bound as I was to haul him to Kirkwall’s Circle, I knew that I never would. Because in those moments of conversation we’d shared, as flustered as I had been discussing the brothel, he was kind and didn’t tease me or belittle me, offering to help me in a way that could have melted my entire suit of armor at my feet. Apparently a little kindness endears me to someone, and how pathetic did that make me feel?</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Knight-Captain,” I heard him call out. I stopped, turned and watched him jog up to me. “May I have a moment?” he asked with a smile.</em>
</p>
<p><em>I’d never been with a man. Or a woman, for that matter. Virginal except for stolen kisses here and there. But his smile…oh, his smile…and his voice when he purred, “Cullen,” like he </em>knew<em> and perhaps he did.</em></p>
<p>
  <em>Which was why seconds later I found my armor clanking against a large boulder hidden by other rocks and some bushes, and found myself with an armful of Garrett Hawke, feeling his breath on my face and seeing his brown eyes which looked to me like the aged honey I’d once had, made from bees that favored Andraste’s Grace flowers.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>All at once he kissed me and I made sounds I wasn’t even aware I could make, awkwardly working around my Templar armor to return it with fervor. Our kiss had lasted for what seemed like hours. Then I heard Varric calling his name from some distance and Hawke flashed that grin at me again.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Good to know that spark I felt when we met wasn’t just one-sided,” he said cheekily. And then he slipped through the bushes and I heard his footfalls on the sand as he rejoined his companions.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>I never was able to go to the Wounded Coast ever again without blushing like a schoolboy.</em>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>“I see you remember,” he says to me now, my face heating up, him stepping close enough that I can almost tell the color of his eyes.</p>
<p>“Of course I do,” I breathe, willing my heart to stop trying to find a way to hammer straight through my ribcage. “What are you doing here?”</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <em>In the Gallows courtyard, his bright, unabashed smile as he approached me with three of his friends at his back, all watching me with a combination of interest and suspicion as their leader openly flirted, held my hand a little too long when he shook it and winked at me before walking away.</em>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Varric told me about what happened at Haven,” Hawke explains, pacing away and then back to me again as he speaks. “Corypheus is a name I never thought I’d hear again.”</p>
<p>“You’ve a history?”</p>
<p>“Yes. I killed him.”</p>
<p>My mind reels. “I…it would appear not.”</p>
<p>I see him scowl. “No. I’ll brief your Inquisitor tomorrow.” He looks down into the courtyard, leaning against the top of the wall. “I’ve just come from the tavern. Varric insisted I meet Bull and his Chargers, and there were several others I was introduced to, but the one man I had hoped to see in coming all the way here to Skyhold, well, he wasn’t there.”</p>
<p>My heart pounds.</p>
<p>“Curly’s probably prowling the walls like always,” Hawke says in his best Varric imitation. I can’t help but chuckle.</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <em>“Varric thinks I’m mad,” he confessed, pressing me into the night shadows that hid affairs and mercs alike in the hallowed streets of Hightown. Then his lips are on mine and I’m thankful for not always wearing my armor as I feel his arousal grow against me as fast as mine does against him and we’re pawing at each other and clawing at clothing before I realize dimly that we’re in public, of all things.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>I pull away, tell him there has to be somewhere we can go. There is, of course, because he now has his own estate here, not many paces from where we stand.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“How did you know I was out here walking?” I asked.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>He takes my hand and pulls me in a particular direction. “I didn’t. I found you. You’re a stray and I’m taking you home.”</em>
</p>
<p><em>That night we made love for the first, second, third and fourth time. I had never felt so sated. So full. So…cared for. I fell for him hook, line and sinker and who wouldn’t? He loved everyone. Everyone loved him. But that night, it was </em>me<em> he took to his bed. </em>Me<em> who slept by his side. </em>Me<em> who received a lazy morning breath kiss and felt the dazzle of his smile focused in all its brilliance upon </em>me<em>.</em></p>
<p>
  <em>A smile that seemed to burn with the fire of a thousand suns.</em>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>The same smile he’s giving me now. “Cullen,” he says softly, pushing me backwards. I stumble around the barrel into the low wall and brace myself with my hands on his shoulders. “You let me go.”</p>
<p>I swallow hard.</p>
<p>“I think you fell in love with me.”</p>
<p>Suddenly my conversation with Bull comes back to me.</p>
<p>
  <em>“Might all work out for the best anyway,” Bull shrugged. </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“How does getting dumped by the Herald of Andraste work out for the best?”</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Hey, you never know what’s out there waiting for you to pull your head outta your ass.”</em>
</p>
<p>“Did you fall in love with <em>me</em>?” I ask, feeling bold, sure of myself in a way I never had been with the Inquisitor or, really, anyone else in my life.</p>
<p>I feel his breath on my lips. I surge forward, squeezing his shoulders until he moans, pulling him as close as I possibly can. His arms envelop me and I flip us, pushing <em>him</em> against the stone. He throws his head back and laughs, and oh, Maker take me now, his voice, that <em>voice</em>, how have I forgotten the insane need I have always had to hear him speak, to have wash over me that full-bodied sound of mirth that makes me chuckle now before I dive back in, smile against smile, swallowing his laughter whole.</p>
<p>It seeps inside me, filling me with the light that’s been out since the last time we touched two nights before what Anders and Meredith did. I had ached so badly for him. And he’s here. Now. In my arms.</p>
<p>“Come,” I say, grabbing his hand and pulling him toward my tower.</p>
<p>“Cullen,” he laughs, allowing me to pull him along until at last he comes even with me and winks when I chance a look at him. “I missed you.”</p>
<p>“You were the one who left.”</p>
<p>“Yes, because an apostate in Kirkwall would have been so welcome, especially at the side of a Templar,” he says sarcastically.</p>
<p>We make it in quick order to the door of my tower. I reach out and am frustrated that I’m wearing gloves when I hold my hand against his cheek. He closes his eyes and leans into my touch and I feel my senses reeling with desire and delight. “None of that matters anymore,” I tell him earnestly. “I’m no Templar and every mage is an apostate. We treat you no differently than anyone else here.”</p>
<p>“We?”</p>
<p>“Me. I.” I gather him in my arms. “Garrett,” I whisper into his ear for the first time in more than two years.</p>
<p>He moans. “Say my name again, Cullen.”</p>
<p>“Only if you keep saying mine.” I kiss him and add, “Garrett.”</p>
<p>And so we do. All night long.</p>
<p>The next day when I see the Inquisitor, I smile brightly and wave across the courtyard. He with Dorian by his side, me with Hawke by mine. Trevelyan looks, recognizes, nods and gives me a tiny salute at his eyebrow.</p>
<p>I’m awfully glad he was smart enough to realize that he and I were not meant to be when I was too busy panting after yet another hero only because I was desperately trying to replace the one I had lost.</p>
<p>He’d once asked me if I’d left anyone behind in Kirkwall. I hadn’t lied, for Hawke had left long before Cassandra had come seeking him and found me instead.</p>
<p>But I had, as it turns out, left my heart there.</p>
<p>A heart which has been returned to me, whole and full of love.</p>
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